Functional Pluralism

= "the idea that organizations should embrace strategic differentiation rather than fighting it, that divergence isn’t a bug but a feature, and that the ability to fork might be one of the most important organizational capacities of our fraught and liminal time". [1]

Description

Benjamin Life:

"Functional pluralism is a deceptively simple idea: let organizational form follow functional diversity. When multiple viable strategies exist, allow multiple implementations to proceed in parallel. When groups have genuinely different theories of change, let them pursue those theories without forcing one to dominate. When people align around different values or approaches, support that differentiation rather than trying to smooth it over or force a single path.

The key word here is “functional.” Functional pluralism is not mere tolerance of difference or diversity as representation. Functional pluralism means that different approaches are actively pursued, resourced, and evaluated. It’s pluralism in action, not just in principle.

This might sound like a recipe for fragmentation, chaos and wasted effort. But consider how nature actually works. Forests don’t have strategic planning committees that decide which type of tree should be planted. Different species emerge and coexist because they occupy different niches, exploit different resources, and thrive under different conditions. The result isn’t chaos; it’s resilience. When one species faces a challenge, others compensate. When conditions change, the forest’s diversity becomes its adaptive capacity."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/fork-you)

Characteristics

Benjamin Life:

"Some practical mechanisms:

Participatory Allocation Through Quadratic Funding

Rather than central decision-makers determining all resource flows, create quarterly or annual funding rounds where network members can signal support for different initiatives. This doesn’t mean abandoning all central coordination—you might still have core operations funded through traditional means—but it creates space for emergent priorities to access resources based on distributed preference rather than centralized approval.

Implementation might look like: 20% of the organization’s budget goes into a quadratic funding pool. Anyone in the network can propose an initiative aligned with the organization’s mission. Network members allocate their voting credits. The funding pool is distributed according to the quadratic formula. Funded initiatives operate semi-autonomously for a defined period, with clear documentation of learnings.

Transparent Forking Protocols

Make it clear how groups can fork to explore new approaches. What reporting/sharing responsibilities do forks have to the broader network? Under what conditions might a fork re-merge? Having clear protocols reduces the drama and interpersonal tension around divergence.

A sample protocol might specify: The fork must articulate clear goals, timeline, and learning questions. If the fork receives sufficient support in a quadratic funding round to meet minimum viability threshold, it proceeds. Forks maintain connection through monthly learning shares and shared documentation. After the defined period, forks present results and may propose either continuation, re-merging, or dissolution.

Cross-Pollination Structures

Create regular opportunities for different approaches to share learnings. This might be monthly “research talks” where teams present what they’re discovering, shared documentation platforms where insights are recorded, or periodic gatherings where different forks reconnect and potentially re-integrate. These feedback loops are essential infrastructure for collective learning.

Explicit Experimentation Frameworks

Frame exploratory forks explicitly as experiments with defined learning goals and timelines. This helps distinguish between “we’re exploring whether this approach works” and “we’re committed to this approach forever.” It also makes evaluation more concrete and less personal. Combined with quadratic funding, this creates a natural rhythm: propose experiment, secure funding through demonstrated support, run experiment, share learnings, network decides whether to continue funding based on results and ongoing interest."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/fork-you)

Example

• See: Forking

Quadratic Voting

Benjamin Life:

"Functional pluralism isn’t just an armchair philosophy or consultant-speak for organizational designers, it’s becoming increasingly practical thanks to new mechanisms for collective decision-making that move beyond binary choices.

Traditional voting mechanisms force binary outcomes. Even when we vote on multiple options, we typically use methods (from ranked choice voting to majority rule) that produce individual winners. This works fine when there genuinely should be only one outcome—when we’re electing a single mayor, for instance. But it’s terrible when we’re trying to allocate resources across multiple valuable initiatives or signal varying levels of support for different strategies.

Enter quadratic voting and quadratic funding—mechanisms explicitly designed to surface and support plural preferences.

Quadratic voting allows people to express not just binary preferences but weighted intensity of preference. Instead of one person, one vote, participants receive a budget of “voice credits” that they can allocate across multiple options. The brilliance of the mechanism is that, unlike dot voting, votes cost quadratically. Your first vote on an option costs 1 credit, your second vote on that same option costs 4 credits, your third costs 9 credits, and so on. This creates a natural check on tyranny of the majority: you can feel very strongly about something and spend many credits to express that intensity, but you pay an increasing price for doing so, which prevents a bare majority from completely dominating outcomes.

The result is a much richer signal about collective preferences. Instead of “51% want A, 49% want B, so we do A,” you might learn that “people moderately support A, but a significant minority feels very strongly about B, and actually quite a few people see value in both.” That’s actionable information for plural outcomes.

Quadratic funding takes this insight and applies it to resource allocation. Originally developed by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and Glen Weyl, quadratic funding is particularly powerful for supporting public goods. Here’s how it works: individuals contribute to projects they care about, and a matching pool amplifies those contributions based on the breadth of support rather than just the total amount contributed. The matching formula rewards projects that have many smaller contributors over projects that have a few large contributors.

The effect is elegant: a project with 100 people contributing $1 each receives more matching funds than a project with 1 person contributing $100, even though the raw totals are the same. The mechanism is essentially saying: “broad-based support is more meaningful than concentrated support” and allocating resources accordingly.

Why does this matter for functional pluralism? These are structural mechanisms that create a way to fund multiple approaches simultaneously based on distributed preference rather than centralized decision-making. Instead of an organization’s board or leadership team deciding which strategic initiative to fund, the community or network can signal support for multiple initiatives, and resources flow accordingly."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/fork-you)

Discussion

The Post-Institutional Future

Benjamin Life:

"There’s a larger context for why functional pluralism matters right now: we’re living through what might be called the twilight of institutional gravity.

For most of modern history, institutions: corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, universities, have been the primary vehicles for coordinated action. This made sense when coordination required significant fixed infrastructure, when information flow required centralized management, and when scaling impact required hierarchical organization.

But digital networks are changing the calculus. Coordination can happen peer-to-peer. Information flows transparently across organizational boundaries. Facing complex and compounding crises, our responses can and must scale horizontally through replication and adaptation rather than centralized control. We’re entering an era where self-organization becomes increasingly viable, where groups can form around specific alignment and shared vision, pursue specific goals, and dissolve or reform as needed, all with much lower organizational overhead than previous eras required.

Technologies like quadratic voting and funding are crucial enablers of this shift. They provide coordination infrastructure that doesn’t require centralized control. A network can make collective decisions and allocate collective resources without anyone being “in charge.” The mechanisms themselves become the coordination layer.

This doesn’t mean institutions disappear. Many institutional functions remain valuable. But it means that institutional gravity weakens. The default assumption that significant work requires building a formal organization with staff and hierarchy and strategic plans becomes questionable. Sometimes the right form is a temporary network of committed individuals who coordinate through shared protocols and plural resource allocation mechanisms, pursue a specific goal, and then dissolve.

Functional pluralism is the organizational logic for this post-institutional context. When organization itself becomes fluid, when groups can form, fork, merge, and dissolve with relative ease, then the ability to embrace strategic differentiation becomes crucial. The question isn’t “what should our organization do?” but “what strategies should we explore, and how should we coordinate between them?”

And the answer increasingly is: let the network signal through plural preference mechanisms. Not rule by majority. Not rule by authority. But resource allocation and priority-setting based on distributed weighted preference, enabled by mathematical mechanisms designed to surface and support plurality.

This is simultaneously exciting and destabilizing. Exciting because it dramatically increases our collective capacity to explore possibility space, to respond to emerging challenges, to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Destabilizing because it requires us to hold much more uncertainty, to operate with less institutional stability, to find coherence through different mechanisms than we’re used to."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/fork-you)

More information

• it's sister principle: Polycentricity